High percentage milk chocolate and tropical island cacao make a great chocolate bar

I love milk chocolate made with very high percentages of cocoa solids.  Here's one of my new favourites:  Cachet Limited Selection 'Vanuatu' 44% Milk Chocolate. It is rich and to me, it has a nice mild tobacco flavour and thick cocoa butter texture. 

Given that the U.S. Government requires a 10% concentration of chocolate liquor and the European Union requires a minimum of 25% cocoa solids (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_chocolate), then a milk chocolate bar with 44% cocoa solids is rather high.

The good thing about eating milk chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa solids is that you know exactly what you are eating.  With 44% cocoa solids, and 20% milk solids (as specified on the package of the Vanuatu bar), there is not much room for any other unnatural or unhealthy ingredients, like the hydrogenated oils or food colourings added into commercial milk chocolate bars.  You also know that it will not be as sweet as commercial chocolate, so you instantly reduce the sugar that you are consuming, but you are still getting a milky chocolate taste.

The other good thing about a high cocoa percentage in milk chocolate is the flavour.  Regional flavours in the beans are not masked when the chocolate is made of beans from a specific origin.  High amounts of sugar and vanilla flavour will mask the uniqueness of origin chocolate.


The Vanuatu chocolate bar by Cachet is
made with forastero beans from Vanuatu, a nation of 83 Islands in the South Pacific Ocean.  Just knowing they have cocoa beans and islands in the South Pacific Ocean made me instantly want to place Vanuatu on my "bucket list" of places to go during my lifetime. Then again, Vanuatu just experienced an undersea earthquake on July 31st that hit a magnitude of 6.1 on the Richter scale. And that was the second earthquake this year.  Yikes, I'll maybe rethink my bucket list entry. But I can still enjoy their cocoa beans thanks to Cachet.

CACHET LIMITED SELECTION 'Vanuatu', 44% Milk Chocolate, forastero, 100g (3.5oz)
Made in Belgium by:  Kim's Chocolates, Belgium.
http://www.kimchoc.be/
Ingredients:  sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk powder, cocoa mass, vanilla (nat. flavour).  Milk chocolate:  cocoa solids min. 44% - milk solids min. 20%.  Contains: milk.  May contain traces of nuts, peanuts, soybeans, eggs and gluten.